I have been quite impressed by the efforts of some of the 'painting-a-day' artists in producing small works quickly with very free loose strokes, such as Karen Margulis, Carole Marine and others. This week, since I had just finished another bigger painting, I thought it might be a useful exercise to try doing a few small paintings in a similar quick loose style during my lunch breaks. I felt I could focus on portraits of native animals. I don't usually do portraits, since I l

On the way back from our trip to Townsville we stopped at St Lawrence. We had been told by a New Zealand couple who had just been there that there were "lots of birds at St Lawrence", and since we felt that we had suffered from something of a deficit of birds on the trip to date, we thought that we had better see for ourselves. Maybe some of the birds that were missing from the Townsville Common were there. For the uninitiated, St Lawrence is a small village on the Queensland